Scoping Research with a Focus on Questioning

This conceptual paper outlines a cross-disciplinary research agenda focused on situating questioning while engaging with the digital environment. It builds upon earlier research focused primarily in the area of why-questioning that identified significant difference between information and explanation as distinct goals of inquiry. Consequences of this distinction point to limitations of current digital technology, particularly from the perspective of an individual researcher engaging in prolonged, reflective inquiry. The digital environment offers numerous options to support inquiry but is dominated by the search paradigm in which the informational bias of search engines abbreviate inquiry, and therefore, questioning. While other digital options such as scholarly collection services, social media, and question-answering services also support inquiry there are limits to which these services can provide targeted support for sense-making activities such as in-session questioning, reasoning, interpreting, identifying connections, discerning relationships and implications, evaluating competing explanations, as well as development and validation of understanding. Within the research agenda outlined here the relationship between sense-making and questioning has emerged as a pivotal area to investigate. In a very reflexive way many questions arise – as the scope of this inquiry includes inquiry itself. What can be learned from a focus on questions as data? How might question formulation be supported online? What digital technologies are successfully used to support sense-making? In what ways might human-computer interfaces be further developed in order to scaffold deep and prolonged in-session questioning? In what ways might ontologies of questioning support such an endeavour? While situated at the nexus of educational research and information science, this research agenda is both informed by, and positioned to inform, other domains of research and innovation, including human-computer interaction,
knowledge management, and communications design. Of particular interest is how application of the Question Formulation Technique and recent innovations in automated Question Generation might be utilized.